Michael Bay is running out of things to blow up, so in The Last Knight he looks to the past. The Transformers have been on Earth for a while, apparently, but their existence is kept quiet by a secret society known as the Witwiccans (as in Sam Witwicky from the first three films, who is apparently a member, even though his great great grandfather found the Transformers entirely by accident, and if Shia LaBeouf’s idea of keeping Transformers quiet is by destroying Chicago in a massive alien battle then he isn’t the kind of person you want in your secret society anyway).
So what have we got going on in Transformers Five? There’s a villain called Quintessa who wants to use Earth to repair Cybertron, Stanley Tucci returns to the franchise playing a completely different character to the one he played in the last film, a whole bunch of Decepticons are released from prison (for some reason, it’s never really explained) and are each given extended Suicide Squad style intros then offer absolutely nothing to the plot, there’s a girl who has potential to be a main character but really does nothing at all, there’s a woman who is apparently the descendant of Merlin but again doesn’t really offer that much. There are also baby Dinobots, which raises some very interesting question regarding Transformer procreation.
Confused? Same.
Physics go out the window. One Transformer has the ability to STOP TIME, something which would have been VERY handy in prior instalments of the series, and the planet Cybertron is at one point slightly larger than the moon (which gets destroyed with very little consequence), then a few minutes later a significant chunk of the same planet is no larger than a sheep paddock in rural England. And this is a planet that’s meant to be the home of a race of giant alien robots.
In the end, the only pleasure you’ll gain from this film is the utter debasement of Sir (SIR) Anthony Hopkins, who says funny words like ‘dude’ and everyone is meant to laugh, and you will laugh, but not because it’s particularly funny, but because Sir (SIR) Anthony Hopkins HAS AN ACADEMY AWARD AND HE IS IN A FILM ABOUT GIANT ALIEN ROBOTS.
This is Michael Bay’s last Transformers film, and that is good news. There are apparently up to ten more Transformers films in the pipeline. That is bad news.
